"FIFTY YEARS AND COUNTING"

 “FIFTY YEARS AND COUNTING”

Today’s blog is by Caroline Leach to close out Women’s Herstory Month.

      This year marks the 50th year of my graduation from Columbia Seminary with a Masters of Divinity in 1972.  For some reason some of the guys at Columbia decided I should get a ‘Mistress’ of Divinity---"ha, ha”, they would laugh.  As I think back to the day in September, 1969 when I walked onto campus as a student, I had no idea of the rocky road ahead for me, for the other women there at the time, and for those who came after us.

  My first encounter, thank goodness ,was meeting Dr. Charlie Cousar, Professor of New Testament. I was so glad to see a friendly face.  Charlie’s father had married my parents and baptized me in our home church in Chattanooga, Tennessee.  I remember his father so fondly, as well as the many members of Central church who peopled my life until I came to Seminary.  I especially give thanks for Rev. Joyce Cummings Tucker and Rev. Sandy Winter.   Charlie, of course, was just a teenager when they moved from Chattanooga, but when I saw him at Columbia, he did remember my parents, for which I was grateful since my dad was ‘letting’ his daughter go into the unknown.  Charlie and Betty became a rock in the midst of the storms in which I would find myself during these seminary years and the many years that followed.

      Those who supported me are legion.  However, the journey was mine alone.  It became very clear - very early - that women were not wanted on campus by the majority of the students and by some of the faculty.  The President even asked me  if I had come to find a husband!  By the time he asked me this question after my first year, I was very emphatic that no man there was on my list of potentials and would never be on any list for that distinction.   

  In the 3 years that followed those first steps, I realized that I would have to make my own way.  Even the very few women on campus---there were 5 when I came—could not envision any other way but the way of ‘man’.   I began to find new language for faith and God and for me.  There are many funny and denigrating stories that can be told.  Needless to say, one of the worst was the day in my final year, when the Placement Director called me into his office and said there would be no job interviews for me or any other  graduating women.  Really I thought---"what about these last 3 years, don’t they count for anything?” Final answer---‘No.’.  I, along with the others,  remained invisible and unemployable.

  So, this brings me to another of those who just gained their sainthood.  Rev. Woody McKay died earlier this month.  He was the only one who even spoke with me about a job---I did not call it a “call”---in those last months of panic before graduation.  Woody was the Campus Minister at Georgia Tech.  I had met him at a youth group event at Decatur Presbyterian church during that year.  I went down to visit with him at his office at Tech one afternoon. He told me he had saved $7,000 in his budget, and he was looking for a woman who would minister with the growing number of women on campus---all 500 at that time in 1972.  Would I be interested? “Of course!” was my reply.   Because of his bravery, I had a job and could be ordained!  There is a story about all that as well, but for another time.  Over the years I was so grateful when I would see Woody and be able to tell how again much I appreciated his willingness to give me a chance to practice ministry in this most unusual of places.  He is remembered by many students for his kindness and awful jokes.  I say "Well done good and faithful servant.”

  Fifty years have not passed quickly nor easily for women in ministry.  We have persisted under the worst sort of scrutiny and prejudice, but we have persisted.  We have been viewed as nothing short of witches and upstarts.  But we have been - and we remain – in ministry for those on the margins and the mainlines, saying as often as possible—“You are a child of God and a first class citizen, deserving all the rights and privileges.”  Thanks be to God,  Caroline

  

"ON SAYING WHO YOU ARE: FAITH RINGGOLD"

 “ON SAYING WHO YOU ARE: FAITH RINGGOLD”

A provocative art piece would greet Caroline and me when we were pastors at Oakhurst.  It was a wonderful print of a story quilt by Faith Ringgold.  It hung on the wall facing the church office as you entered the doors near the office.  The print was entitled “Church Picnic,” and it depicted a Black church picnic in Atlanta’s Piedmont Park in 1909.  The quilt had been commissioned by the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, and Ringgold had presented it in 1988.  One of our stalwart Oakhurst artists and visionaries, Virginia Gailey, had purchased the print for the church and had it framed for us to hang on that wall.  There is a powerful story behind the quilt, but in this Women’s Herstory Month, I want to concentrate on Faith Ringgold’s story.  I hope that you’ll find this quilt for yourself online and look up its backstory too!  She now has a retrospective exhibit at the New Museum in Manhattan entitled “Faith Ringgold:  American People.”  For more info and a review of this exhibit see the NYT 2/18/22.

Faith Ringgold was born in Harlem in 1930 to Andrew Jones and Willi Posey Jones, descendants of working class families who left the South in one of the Great Migrations.  Her mom was a fashion designer, and her father was a remarkable storyteller.  She grew up on the edges of the Harlem Renaissance, and her neighbors included Duke Ellington and Langston Hughes, along with her boyhood friend Sonny Rollins.  At her mother’s feet, she learned the visual arts, using crayons in her youth and learning to sew and use fabric in many creative ways.  At her father’s feet, she learned the power of narrative, to be used in all types of art.  She wanted to be an artist to combine her tradition and her vision.

In 1950 she enrolled at the City College of New York in order to better develop and to major in art.  Much to her dismay, she learned that women were not allowed to major in art – she had to settle for art education.  She did get an unexpected benefit from it – she got a job teaching in public school in New York.  One of her students there was Paula Baldwin, younger sister of James Baldwin.  Ms. Baldwin Whaley would introduce Ringgold to her brother and his writings.  Baldwin would befriend her and mentor her and introduce her to important people in art.  In response to her interest in art, two of the male friends, Romare Bearden and Hale Woodruff, would figuratively pat her on the head, reminding her that serious art was a male endeavor.

Faith Ringgold was not deterred by these patriarchal reactions – she marched on into painting, and with inspiration from Baldwin and Jacob Lawrence, she put together a series of paintings entitled “American People Series” in 1963.  It is the series that is the basis for the current exhibit in the New Museum.  This series  depicted American life in relation to the burgeoning civil rights movement.  She focused on these interactions from a female point of view, and this series illustrates the intersectionality of race and gender in her art and in her point of view.  This was her reaction to the racism and sexism which sought to push her to the side:  “No other creative field is as closed to those who are not white and male as is the visual arts. After I decided to be an artist, the first thing that I had to believe was that I, a black woman, could penetrate the art scene, and that, further, I could do so without sacrificing one iota of my blackness or my femaleness or my humanity.”

She decided to add quilting to her artistic repertoire in order to step away from the male dominated Western/European medium of painting.  Long associated with “women’s work,” quilting became a medium for Ringgold to express both her womanist and anti-racist perspective.  Her mother’s help and expertise were part of her collaboration, as she added quilting to her wide range of art, and in 1980, her first story quilt “Echoes of Harlem,” was produced.  As she said: “In 1983, I began writing stories on my quilts s an alternative.  That way, when my quilts were hung up to look at, or photographed for a book, people could still read my stories.”  Her first quilt story was “Who’s Afraid of Aunt Jemima?”.  It shows Aunt Jemima as a matriarch restaurant owner and seeks to redeem, as she put it “the most maligned black female stereotype.”

Her artistic creativity seems to know no bounds – she has written 17 children’s books, done sculpture, and she is a performance artist.  She has won numerous awards, is Professor Emeritus from UC San Diego,  and has been arrested  at protests related to racism and sexism and artistic freedom.  Her print “United States of Attica” was a tribute to the people killed in the Attica prison by a police attack.  From crayons to clay, from paints to fabric, from performance to protest, Faith Ringgold has been on the vanguard of visionary leadership.  In this Women’s Herstory Month, check out her artistic work and her continuing prophetic life.  In her words:  “You can't sit around and wait for somebody to say who you are. You need to write it and paint it and do it.”

"WATCHERS ON THE WALL"

 “WATCHERS ON THE WALL”

I heard from Michelle Duster this week.  She is a well-known author and human rights activist, as well as being the great-great granddaughter of Ida B. Wells. She is author of the powerful book “Ida B The Queen,” and she wrote one of the Forewords to Dr. Catherine Meeks and my book “Passionate for Justice: Ida B. Wells as Prophet for Our Time.”  Michelle was noting that a federal anti-lynching bill was now the closest it has ever gotten to being passed into law.  It has been passed by both houses of Congress, and it awaits the President’s signature.  We both gave thanks, but we also noted that no federal law against lynching has ever been signed into law in the history of the USA.  Most people are unaware of this lack of a federal law against lynching – it seems like a no-brainer, but the White South has always been a powerful force in American history.

During this Women’s Herstory Month, I want to give thanks for the witness of Ida B. Wells, especially in the context of lynching.  My friend John Cole Vodicka reminded me last week that it was the 130th anniversary of the lynching of 3 Black men in Memphis, one of whom was Ida Wells’ friend, Tom Moss.  It was that 1892 event that set her off on her journalistic career, as she was disgusted with the white explanation that the lynching was the responsibility of the Black men, that their behavior had set it off.  Wells decided to do an investigation of the recent lynchings in the USA, especially in the South.  Using white newspaper sources, she wrote an incendiary report on those lynchings, entitled “Southern Horrors: Lynch Laws in All Its Phases.”   Why was it incendiary?  It was so explosive because it revealed the truth behind the lynchings:  they were the result of white terrorism, not Black behavior.  Her report was not only figuratively explosive – it also was literally explosive.  White people in Memphis blew up her newspaper office and put a price on her head.  She left the South and did not return for almost 30 years.  When she returned, it was to investigate yet another mass lynching in my home county, Phillips County in Arkansas.

Wells was already an activist before these events, but her report made her a national figure, and for the next 40 years she would investigate, agitate, and activate.  She was a strong fighter for racial justice and for women’s justice – she was “intersectional” before it became a sociology concept.  She would not take a back seat as a person classified as “Black,” and she would not take a back seat as a person classified as “female.”  In our book on Wells and on her meaning for today, Dr. Meeks and I describe her as “fearless, ferocious, formidable, and feminist.”  This year in July marks the 160th anniversary of her birth as an enslaved girl in Holly Springs, Mississippi.  Her parents died of yellow fever when she was 16, and she wrestled with her father’s Masonic Lodge colleagues to take guardianship of her younger siblings, and she prevailed.  Her life is full of sheroism, with her share of  troubles and travails, but she did not yield to the forces of racism or sexism, even as they stormed around her.

    As Dr. Meeks points out in our book on Wells, as well as in our discussions with groups on our book, Wells was an ordinary person.  Looking back on it, there is no doubt that hers is an extraordinary life, but our caution is to refrain from making her a saint of social justice, though she certainly is.  We must remember that in many ways, she was just like us - caught up in the whirlwinds and slings and arrows of life, but all the while listening for that voice inside her and outside her, a voice that told her that she was a human being, no matter what the world thought about her.  She found her voice, and we are urged to do the same in our own time and in our own lives.  If you don’t know her story, check out our book or Michelle Duster’s book, or you can go to the source itself, Ida B. Wells’ autobiography “Crusade for Justice,” so lovingly put together by her daughter Alfreda Duster, after Wells’ untimely death in 1931.  The last chapter of that book is entitled “The Price of Liberty,” and Wells begins it with these words:

    “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty, and it does seem to me that notwithstanding all these social agencies and activities, there is not that vigilance which should be exercised in the preservations of our rights…..be alert as the watcher on the wall.”  As we watch SCOTUS move the dial back on women’s rights, as we watch the rise of the White South yet once again, these words of warning from Wells sound out anew – we must be watchers on the wall, to use the Biblical phrase from Isaiah 62.  Let us find our place in that witnessing, as Wells did and continues to do. 

"ASHES TO ASHES, DUST TO DUST"

 “ASHES TO ASHES, DUST TO DUST”

“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”  Caroline and I used those words from the Ash Wednesday liturgy last week as we led the worship service at a seniors residence on the edge of Decatur.  Ash Wednesday is not a happy day in the liturgical calendar – it begins the season of Lent.  Lent is a time when we are asked  to begin a season of reflection on human mortality, on our brokenness and woundedness.

In this season of Lent in 2022, it is not difficult to imagine human brokenness.  We are not being sad sack, depressing Christians when we ask people to remember our woundedness.  The Russian bombs are falling on Ukraine.  The White South is once again rising in American culture, as it has so many times.  Many of us have lost friends and loved ones to the power of death recently.  The Covid pandemic has made us all feel isolated and overwhelmed and lost.  Our national love of weapons and violence is proving its power, as we see huge rates in homicides and gun violence.  In these days, the season of Lent doesn’t seem so much to be a brief prelude on the way to Easter – it seems more like our permanent state of being in the world in these days.

The tradition of Lent is that we are asked to journey with Jesus to the Cross, and in that journey, we are asked to reflect upon our captivity to various powers which cause us to hurt ourselves, hurt others, and to hurt God.  That captivity usually grows out of our own individual woundedness and of the collective woundedness of us as a culture.   It is that woundedness and that captivity which make us believe that the powers like race and gender and money and redemptive violence can bring us relief, and even bring us meaning.  

In this journey of Lent, we are asked to remember how quickly many of the followers of Jesus fled the scene when he got arrested and especially when he was given the death penalty by Rome.  Only a few of the women disciples stayed with him, and as we enter Women’s Herstory Month, we are asked to remembe that it is the women who have given us the model to follow, not the men.   Jesus came to teach us that it is in love that we find healing for our woundedness and brokenness, not in any of the other categories or fixes of the world.  

    Our first response to this message of love is always a resounding “NO!”  We respond in this way because we are all so threatened by acknowledging our woundedness and the recognition that we all need to love and be loved.  The season of Lent asks us to reflect and act upon this process in the individual and collective human heart, to discern how our pain and our wounds cause us to join the former followers of Jesus who shout out “Crucify him!”

I grew up in  a working class Protestant church, so I was unfamiliar with the traditions of Lent.  Some traditions ask us to give up something for Lent.  Some people give up chocolate; some people give up FaceBook;  some people give up meat.  For this season in 2022, let us give up our captivity to white supremacy.  Let us give up our captivity to sexism.  Let us give up our belief that those who love people of the same gender are inhuman.  Let us give up our belief in that money gives meaning to life.  Let us give up the belief that redemptive violence is possible.  Let us pick one of these captivities and concentrate on its power in our lives in this season of Lent.  That captivity definitely takes us to the Cross.  Perhaps a time of self-reflection on such a captivity can help start us on the road to liberation.

Some traditions emphasize fasting during Lent, and in some Lenten seasons, I have fasted from food one day a week, allowing me to feel a few hunger pangs.  As I think about Lent in this year, I am reminded of one of the lectionary readings for Ash Wednesday.  It is from Chapter 58 of the prophet Isaiah, and the prophet quotes God as sharing this message with us from verses 6-7:

“Is this not the fast that I choose, to loose the bonds of injustice, 

To undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free?

Is it not to share your bread with the hungry

And bring the homeless poor into your house,

When you see those without clothing, to share with them?”

In our fasting in this Lenten season, let us be guided by these suggestions.  Lent reminds us that we are headed to the Cross – there is no way around that.  It also suggests ways that we may begin to find some liberation as we journey there.  May it be so with us in this time of woundedness and brokenness.  May we find healing and passion.

"SCIPIO AFRICANUS JONES"

 “SCIPIO AFRICANUS JONES”

In her Magnificat in Luke 1, Mary sings a powerful song when she affirms that she is pregnant with Jesus:  “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for God has looked down with favor upon God’s lowly servant.”  I wonder if Jemmina, an enslaved woman from Arkansas, was thinking of those words during her pregnancy as her white supremacist master took her back into slavery.   She was impregnated during the master’s sexual abuse of her.  A son was born in 1863 from that abuse, and she named him Scipio Africanus, after the famous Roman general who defeated Hannibal in 202 CE.  She was hoping for great things from her son, and he delivered.

As I noted last week, the White South always seems to be rising in American history.  During one of the most powerful times of the White South, Scipio Africanus Jones  became a famous lawyer in Arkansas, no matter the racial classification.  He defied odds and hung out his shingle, and his most famous case came in 1919, when he stepped forward to appeal the convictions and the death sentences of the Elaine 12.  In early October of 1919, Black sharecroppers were meeting in a church near Elaine, which is about 20 minutes from my hometown of Helena.  They were meeting to try to find ways to get better prices for the cotton that they grew in neo-slavery times.  White people drove up to the church and fired into it, but the Black farmers were not cowed – they returned the fire.  This led to the death of a white man, and a huge white race riot broke out.  The riot went on for several days, and during this time, at least 235 African-Americans were murdered and lynched.

When US Army troops finally stropped the killing and restored some order, 12 Black men were charged with murder, and 100 other Black people were charged with various other crimes.  All of their actions were done in self-defense, but they were the ones who were arrested!  The Elaine 12 were tried in Helena, with mobs of angry white people roaming the courthouse grounds, all threatening to kill anyone who considered an acquittal for the Elaine 12.  In no great surprise, the jury of all white men returned a guilty verdict for the Elaine 12 – it is said that it took the jury only 20 minutes to decide the verdict.  The men were sentenced to death under this mob atmosphere.  The mobs then wanted to lynch the Elaine 12, but the governor decided to move them to the jail in Little Rock until their death sentences were carried out.

No lawyers, white or Black, were interested in taking their case, and even the NAACP had difficulty finding an attorney.  Breathing in the power of his name, Scipio Africanus Jones responded to the plea from the NAACP and stepped forward to take their case on appeal.  After the sudden death of his white co-counsel George Murphy, Jones  would largely do the work of this case on his own. He received many death threats for taking the case – an African-American fighting for the lives of twelve Black men whose cases looked hopeless.  Jones appealed the case to the Arkansas Supreme Court, but his appeal was denied.  Through many twists and turns, including a visit by Ida B. Wells to the Elaine 12, Jones finally got the case before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Even after all his great work in getting this case to the Supreme Court, the NAACP did not think that Jones could handle the argument before the Court.  Much to his dismay, he was replaced by white attorneys – indeed he was not even allowed in the courtroom when the case was argued before SCOTUS.  He still was central, however.  Because he knew the case backwards and forwards, he wrote most of the brief for the arguments to SCOTUS.  As he noted, his goal was not personal glory – his goal was to spare the lives of the Elaine 12 and even to seek their freedom.

His hard and dedicated work paid off.  In February, 1923, in a 6-2 vote in Moore v. Dempsey, SCOTUS overturned the convictions of the Elaine 12 and remanded them back for a retrial.  It was a turning point in the history of SCOTUS on intervening in state criminal cases.  It changed the nature of the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The ruling allowed for federal courts to hear and examine evidence in state criminal cases to ensure that defendants had received due process.  It would take a while longer, but eventually all of the Elaine 12 were freed from prison.

    Not only had Scipio Africanus Jones changed the course of the lives of the Elaine 12 and their families – he also opened the door for an expansion of federal courts to intervene in the state cases of the White South seeking to crush Black defendants.  We’re in discouraging days now, with the White South rising again, but let us be inspired by Scipio Africanus Jones, and by those among us now who are like him.  Let us be counted in their number and find our places in such a parade of witnesses and justice workers.

"WHITE SOUTH RISING"

 “WHITE SOUTH RISING”

When I was growing up in the Arkansas Delta of the Mississippi River, my only friends were classified as white.  I didn’t have Black friends;  I didn’t even know  that was possible.  In those days, we used a saying that reflected our white Southerness:  “Save your Confederate money, boys, the South’s gonna rise again.”   I heard it and I said it.  I think that I even sort of believed it.  In those years after Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954, the “white” Southern way of life seemed under threat, though it was hard to imagine any big changes coming.  Our imagination was truncated – we had not anticipated the creativity, the courage, and the dedication of the sea of the civil rights movement.

Things did change, but my own individual and communal history remind me that the White South is never far away.  It is never far away because it has been with us since the European beginnings of the nation.  The White South shaped the US Constitution, with slavery allowed to stand (though the word “slavery” is never mentioned in the original Constitution).  The White South shaped the Fugitive Slave Acts of 1793 and 1850 – notice that the language of the law shapes our thinking – those escaping from enslavement are not called “human beings” but rather “slaves.”

    It shaped the horrendous SCOTUS decision in 1857 in the Dred and Harriet Scott case, where the Court denied that people classified as “Black” were human beings at all.  Even after the death of over 700,000 people in the Civil War to end slavery, the White South made its comeback to re-establish slavery as “Jim Crow,” or as it should be known – “neo-slavery.”  

The White South tenaciously held on to neo-slavery until the Voting Rights Act dealt it a severe blow in 1965..  The White South was not eradicated in 1965, as many of us thought that it might be.  It has been biding its time and once again establishing its rootedness in American culture.  The White South is rising again. When I use “White South,” I do not mean it as a geographical term, although its base is in the old Confederacy.  The “White South” describes a spiritual force that is taking hold in all parts of the country, a phenomenon that believes in white male supremacy and seeks to enforce it, all the while keeping an eye on the demographics.  My state of Georgia has passed many laws intended to limit the opportunity for voting, with the knowledge that the demographics are pushing us quickly to the time when there will be no majority racial category in the state or in the country.  Eighteen other states have passed such laws, and obviously these are not all in the South.  The voice of the White South spoke in the SCOTUS decision Shelby v. Holder in 2013, which gutted a key portion of the Voting Rights Act.  The White South spoke in the presidential elections of Richard Nixon with his Southern strategy, of Ronald Reagan with his distrust of government, of George W. Bush with his “Don’t Mess with Texas” approach, and of course of Donald Trump with his overt emphasis on white supremacy. 

One main difference so far in the current rise of the White South is that most of the vigilante violence, that made the “Mississippi Plan” of the 1890’s so horrible and powerful – most of that has not been re-ratified -YET.  The guilty verdicts in a south Georgia courtroom for the killers of Ahmaud Arbery tell us that at this point only police violence against Black and Brown people is tolerated.  Let us work to make sure that stays the case, and let us work to end the police violence.

The pressures are rising, however.  The White South violence on the Capitol on January 6 remind us that the life of the White South pulses through us as a people, and that we can never assume that it is over and vanquished.  The election of Donald Trump was a clarion call to the White South raiders, and whether Trump runs in 2024 or not, the White South has heard the call and is responding.  

What can those of us who believe in the idea of equality do?  There are several steps that I’ll be looking at in future blogs, but for now, three steps stand out.  First is recognition – recognize that the White South is rising and that this rise is not an aberration but rather is part of the DNA of American culture.  Remind everyone you meet of this fact.  Second, testify and contact your reps in state legislatures (like mine) that are considering banning the teaching of this kind of American history, banning what they are calling “critical race theory.”  Such a ban would mean that no public school or college can teach what you have read in this blog.

Third, remember that this is fundamentally about voting at this point, so register yourself to vote and make sure that you find ten people who are not registered to vote and get them to register and to vote.  The elections of 2022 are fundamental in slowing this rise of the White South – if their candidates win, there may not be many more viable elections.  

"TALKIN DAISY BATES"

 “TALKIN’ DAISY BATES”

I wrote last week a bit about the story of Daisy Bates and her central part in the desegregation of public schools in Little Rock and indeed in the nation.  I had first learned her name as a cuss word in Arkansas, when I was ten and was still in deep captivity to white supremacy.  It was not until I was a young adult that I began to see her in a very different light – a courageous and determined woman, who nurtured the Little Rock Nine students, all of  whom had to endure the slings and arrows of outrageous white supremacy.  

Because of the brevity of the blog, I was not able to include some of the stories and quotes of those events.  So, I want to include several now, asking us to remember, but also as we watch the White South Rising in our time.  I’ll have more of that Rising next week.  I want to share these stories and quotes to help us find our way to be visionaries and resisters in our time.  

The nine students gathered at the home of Daisy and LC Bates every day in 1957 for nonviolence training and for preparation for entering Central High School.  After they had been driven away from the school by the violence of a white mob, President Dwight Eisenhower finally ordered 1,000 US Army troops from the Screaming Eagles to go to Little Rock to guard the students and to maintain order.  Daisy Bates remembers the arrival of the troops at her house on that first day this way:

“Army jeeps were rolling down Twenty-eighth Street.  Paratroopers quickly jumped out and stood across the width of the street at each end of the block…..The paratrooper in charge of the detail leaped out of the station wagon and started up our driveway.  As he approached, I heard Minniejean say gleefully:  “Oh, look at them, they’re so – so soldierly!  It gives you goose pimples to look at them!.”  And then she added solemnly, “For the first time in my life, I feel like an American citizen.”

The Little Rock Nine were delivered safely that day to Central High, but it would be a long and difficult year.  One of the Nine, Melba Patillo Beals, has written a powerful book on her experience “Warriors Don’t Cry.”  On May 29, 1958, Ernest Green would become the first Black graduate in the South from a previously all-white high school. 

At the center of this whirlwind was Daisy Bates, and her name was spread around the country – for bad in my case, but for good in so many other places.  Indeed, Daisy Bates would be the only woman allowed to speak at the March on Washington in August, 1963 – she broke through that male glass ceiling, as she had broken so many other barriers.   One of the emcees that day was Bayard Rustin, and he introduced her before she spoke.  In his intro, he connected her work with that of the Children’s Campaign in Birmingham in the spring of 1963.  This is how he introduced her:

“Now I want to introduce a woman.  She is important because she started the children’s movement, a movement of young people which culminated in the thousands of children who demonstrated in Birmingham.  You know who I mean, Daisy Bates.”  She gave a short speech:

“Mr. Randolph, friends, the women of this country give our pledge to you, to Martin Luther King, Roy Wilkins and all of you fighting for civil liberties—that we will join hands with you as women of this country. Rosa Gregg, Vice President; Dorothy Height, the National Council of Negro Women; and the Delta Sigma Theta Sorority; the Methodist Church Women, all the women pledge that we will join hands with you. We will kneel-in; we will sit-in until we can eat in any corner in the United States. We will walk until we are free, until we can walk to any school and take our children to any school in the United States. And we will sit-on and we will kneel-in and we will lie-in if necessary until every Negro in America can vote. This we pledge to the women of America.”

Towards the end of her life in 1999, Daisy Bates was asked about her motivation for stepping up to take leadership in Little Rock and beyond.  She replied:  “If you live as long as I have, and have been recognized for doing anything considered brave or worthy, people will always want to know how you became that person, or where you found the courage to be that person.  I never thought I was doing anything a whole of lot of other people in Little Rock couldn’t have done.  It was just something that had to be done if we expected to make progress.  I was in the position to take the lead on it, and I took it.

As the White South seeks to rise again (and not just in the South), we would all do well to remember the witness and work of Daisy Bates and so many others, and we should seek to find our place in that great cloud of witnesses in our time.